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| Battery Experts needed | |
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| Topic Started: Aug 24 2015, 03:12 AM (1,817 Views) | |
| campy | Nov 30 2016, 06:11 AM Post #76 |
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Handyman Extraordinaire
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Wildie. My battery charger checked with a voltmeter outputs exactly 12 volts. I will check it again. I just took a quick look and maybe it's 12.5 volts. It also has a 6 volt output. It was originally used to charge a 6 volt golf cart battery. If I put that 12 volt battery charger on my car battery it outputs 12 volts and it charges the battery. Why? Because if the battery is discharged it is holding less than 12 volts. Hmmn? Wildie. If the charger is taking electrons from the battery where do those electrons go? There's nowhere to store them in the charger. |
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| Trotsky | Nov 30 2016, 06:34 AM Post #77 |
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Big City Boy
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Back to the hydro plant and then back up the river? laugh123 Actually, I doubt that the electrons go anywhere. Rather it is just the pulse of the electrons that moves. Akin to a wave where the water molecules pretty much stay in place, it is just the pulse of the wave that is transmitted. Same with heat transmission, hot atoms vibrate at high speed. This motion is transmitted to nearby atoms and the heat energy is thus transmitted without any actual net movement of hot, atoms. Edited by Trotsky, Nov 30 2016, 06:39 AM.
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| wildie | Nov 30 2016, 07:32 AM Post #78 |
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Veteran Member
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Looking back, I said that the charger behaves like a short circuit and electrons that are gathered on the negative plates will be drawn to the positive plates via the charger. |
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| wildie | Nov 30 2016, 08:01 AM Post #79 |
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Veteran Member
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The old school that I attended taught that electrons move from the orbit around one atom to the other. If an electron leaves an atom it leaves a hole that another electron can inhabit. It was considered electrons jumping from atom to atom was a 'flow' ! Electrons can be forced to move for example pressure (voltage) can be applied to force electrons to occupy space in a capacitor. These electrons are considered to be a 'charge' ! When I think about the movement of electrons, I harken back to vacuum tube theory. Where the cathode is heated by the heater and electrons are boiled away from the cathode and form a bit of a cloud of electrons, then we put an anode in place with a voltage polarity that attracts the cloud of electrons to the anode. By placing a grid or screen in the way, the movement of electrons can be controlled by making a small change in the voltage thats applied to grid. Vacuum tubes are now obsolete, but the principles are still valid! |
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| campy | Nov 30 2016, 11:09 AM Post #80 |
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Handyman Extraordinaire
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I was guessing again. Maybe they go into heat. |
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| campy | Nov 30 2016, 11:57 AM Post #81 |
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Handyman Extraordinaire
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O.K. In the interest of science. I hooked up my digital multimeter to get a more accurate reading. Here's the picture. Notice, made in Canada with both official languages. That proves it's an old timer charger.
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| Delphi51 | Dec 1 2016, 06:52 AM Post #82 |
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Member title
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Trotsky, I agree with your "nice safety feature" observation. Kind of like filling the gas tank - it builds up back pressure and the pump stops before overflowing. Campy, my take on the reverse flow of current into the charger is that it won't happen. The charger has diodes that permit current to flow only in one direction. Of course it is possible the diodes are shorted out, in which case there would be AC rather than DC on the output. Maybe you need a second opinion on that voltage - got access to a second meter? If you have a multimeter with a 10 amp (at least) range you could measure the current flowing into the battery to find out how well it is charging. If you aren't familiar with measuring current, don't try it without help. Easy to burn out the meter. I used to lose one every year at school despite carefully explaining how to do it. |
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| Trotsky | Dec 1 2016, 06:56 AM Post #83 |
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Big City Boy
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I have found that a voltmeter is of little use on a rectified DC current. I don't know the explanation, but I have always gotten a low reading on any device that is ostensibly making DC from AC. Perhaps it has to do with combining half sine waves and calling it DC when it is really just a little less "bumpy" AC.
Edited by Trotsky, Dec 1 2016, 06:57 AM.
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| campy | Dec 1 2016, 07:23 AM Post #84 |
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Handyman Extraordinaire
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The voltage on the multimeter.? Notice on the charger. The multimeter is hooked up to nothing. So the voltage doesn't have to be high. The condition of the battery determines the voltage being used to charge it. That shows up on the meter. If the battery is in discharged condition the needle is at 5 or 6 and then gradually diminishes. So the voltage going into the battery might be higher than 12.22 volts when it's hooked up to a battery. That would only make sense. Notice what it says on the meter. The condition of the battery. When I have a good look at it that's quite a charger for its day and age. I'm not going to fool around with the amps. I don't have a clue in that direction. Suffice it to say that the charger works and the battery gets charged overnight without a problem and doesn't overload when it is charged up. It shuts off. The needle is at zero. When the battery was fully discharged, the meter was jumping back and forth and I figured the charger was faulty. It wasn't. It was responding to the discharged battery. I had the good sense to leave it on until it settled down. |
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| Trotsky | Dec 1 2016, 07:45 AM Post #85 |
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Big City Boy
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I had the almost identical charger, bought in 1975 when Korvettes was closing up shop, except without a scratch. It never left the apartment I carried the battery upstairs for charging. Half price as I recall, about $25. Edited by Trotsky, Dec 1 2016, 07:47 AM.
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| campy | Dec 1 2016, 08:59 AM Post #86 |
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Handyman Extraordinaire
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Not supposed to charge batteries in an enclosed space. Hydrogen gas I think. |
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| wildie | Dec 1 2016, 12:43 PM Post #87 |
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Veteran Member
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Once I installed a string of battery's used to back up a telephone switching system. The switching system was to be installed in a main frame computer room. I had to install the battery's in an adjacent room as the fumes from gassing would cause corrosion in the computer plug-in connections. Battery fumes are acidic as the electrolyte in lead acid battery's is in fact sulfuric acid (H2SO4) The corrosion from sulfuric acid is well known. |
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| Dialtone | Dec 1 2016, 02:52 PM Post #88 |
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Gold Star Member
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Bill, your post reminded me of the time I spent working for a telco equipment installation crew back in my early years. I worked for a while installing Telco switching system batteries, now we're talking batteries. Each one is only 2V but was the size of a bar fridge, weighing in at over 400 lbs each. Telephone switching works on 48V DC, so we had to mount 24 batteries onto 2 strings, a lower and upper tier. To get the batteries onto the stingers, we used a battery lift, and each one had to be perfectly placed and spaced to fit on the rack. Once placed we connected the batteries to each other using bus bars, and then to the rectifiers for initial charge. The batteries used to be made by Gould, but looked a lot like these : http://www.infinityps.net/images/Telecom-Power-Plant-Under-Construction.png . The cable used for large power jobs was 750 MCM, a pure copper cable about 1' in diameter and a 1 foot piece weighs about 5 pounds, the cable reels weighed over a ton and required several people to roll them.. and stop them once they got moving. To bend it, we had special tools, benders, and hammers to force it into corners when laying it onto the cable runway, guys who worked for years on the power crews had arms the size of trees, you didn't mess with them. We worked hard and played hard, those sure were the days. |
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| campy | Dec 1 2016, 03:01 PM Post #89 |
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Handyman Extraordinaire
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I'm starting to think that the battery charger I showed has a variable voltage input depending on the battery it is charging. |
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| FuzzyO | Dec 1 2016, 03:52 PM Post #90 |
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DT you should be keeping copies of those sorts of memories. I'm sure they will be of interest in the future. |
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